News and Insight

6 reasons to invest in a business Wide Area Network (WAN)

A Wide Area Network (WAN) is a communication network that extends over a large geographical distance, connecting multiple sites and their respective local area networks (LAN). It can be made up of any mix of both wired and wireless technologies, such as ethernet, fttc, adsl and mobile connectivity.

Here are 6 reasons to invest in a Wide Area Network (WAN) for your business:

A Wide Area Network is more Secure

Your WAN is fully supported 24x7x365 and comes with a guaranteed uptime promise

You can centralise your IT Infrastructure

You enjoy more bandwidth that is dedicated specifically to your needs

Your can easily scale your WAN as you grow

You can use your WAN to carry both voice and data communications

1. A Wide Area Network is more Secure

By adopting a wide area network for your business, you will be able to share access to your encrypted business critical applications, data, services and other centrally located resources efficiently and securely, with no need for your information to travel over the Internet.

This is a hugely beneficial advantage given the commercial sensitivity of your data and the impact should that data be compromised.

You benefit from true business-class support that guarantees uptime as part of a service level agreement, providing you with fast 24x7x365 monitoring and support. We will detect issues before they become business affecting and then get you operational again quickly should an issue arise.

This should provide you with the peace of mind you need at a time when any downtime to your business could be catastrophic.

3. You can centralise your IT Infrastructure

With the increased drive to centralise critical IT Infrastructure in secure data centres, the need to adopt a secure WAN to connect to that infrastructure, possibly from multiple locations, becomes infinitely more important. With a WAN solution, you are able to adopt the centralised model, simplifying the management of your technology and ensuring that you no longer have to invest in email and file servers, storage, support, backup solutions etc for multiple locations, as well as allowing you to take advantage of business wide economies of scale.

As you look to support an ever growing number of users, applications and sites, secure data sharing and syncing over a business wide area network is crucial to the productivity and effectiveness of your team.

4. You enjoy more bandwidth that is dedicated specifically to your needs

The backbone of your network will most likely be made up of ethernet leased lines, connecting your core locations to your centralised IT infrastructure, especially with the continual decrease in the cost of ethernet connectivity. These leased lines provide you with a much bigger ‘pipe’ with which to transfer your data, with no contention and no difference between upload and download speeds. Additionally, you don’t have to worry about data transfer limits between sites as the traffic is seen as local traffic as it doesn’t get exposed to the Internet.

If latency is found to be an issue, there are a number of ways that your WAN can be optimised to overcome it. That includes activities such as deduplicating your data, compressing it, introducing traffic shaping, optimising protocols and providing local caches, for example.

With this more capable backbone, you will find that your team’s efficiency is increased and their productivity boosted.

5. You can easily scale your WAN as you grow

Your WAN can be as big as you need it to be. As you open up more locations, each can be added as a node onto your secure wide area network without affecting the rest of your network. Over time, as your applications become more bandwidth heavy, it is a simple case of upgrading your core backbone to cater for the increased demands on your network. As mentioned, the added nodes can be made up of a wide variety of connectivity types according to the specific needs and services available in any particular location.

You can be confident that by investing in your WAN, you will be future-proofing your network while catering for growth.

6. You can use your WAN to carry both voice and data communications

True unified communications is now a reality. You can use your WAN to carry all of your voice traffic to a central telephony solution, using quality of service (QoS) protocols to ensure clear business communications. By combining both your voice and data onto one corporate wide area network, you benefit from not having to rent ISDN capacity, while also reducing your need to support two different networks at each of your business locations.

This will decrease your costs and further simplify the IT Infrastructure that you need to support and manage, while also allowing you to communicate faster and more efficiently.

Having a secure WAN will unlock a number of important benefits for your business, especially if you have a number of different sites or if you are connecting to a data centre or cloud service. Wanstor has a great deal of experience providing incredibly reliable WAN services, backed by a large, knowledgeable team working 24x7x365. Contact us on 0333 123 0360 or contact us online to discuss your options for the optimal WAN solution for your business needs.